Well, it is Christmas ... usually that means presents can be found under the Christmas tree ...

May we present to you the new North American City Set by Oz and lifeblood (artists), wallyweb (testing) and myself (coding).

At this point, I'd also like to acknowledge Aegir's early work and involvement with the North American Buildings Set (NABS); after all it was his work with NABS that inspired me to create NA City, the successor of NABS. Without Aegir's support, we would not be able to release this set publicly.

It is an absolutely new set, if you believe you've seen something like this before, you probably must have been dreaming ...

It is another one of the sets in the Canadian/American suite of graphic sets; which already contains North American Roads, Canadian Trains and Stations. It is of course equally at home anywhere in the world.

. CBD (Central Business District); the set will build tall office blocks, hotel tower and department store, at the time of construction, in the innermost zone only, starting with zone 2. With large office blocks being built in the 2 innermost zones only; thus creating a CBD.

. Multi-directional buildings; such buildings will align themselves according to streetscape. The buildings will have one side that would suit street frontages. The alignment is automatic and may change, if roads are built/removed. Currently we have one such building, a residential house with 8 variants and 128 paint schemes, now the letterbox need not be in the backyard any more.

. Unique buildings; the hotel tower, department store and 'Flatiron' office tower are unique buildings, numbers are restricted but the likelihood is very high they will be built. They are also protected, once built they should hang around forever.

. Tourist industry; the hotels 'accept' and 'produce' tourists, without having such industries located in the city. You may use the internal tourist industry (part of NA City, enabled via parameter) or any 3rd party industry/cargo set, that has a tourist industry defined [cargo label = TOUR] but not both. Use trams, buses or trains to provide transportation for tourists; each individual hotel is capable of producing and accepting tourists.

. Building restrictions; almost all buildings are restricted in one way or another, i.e. whether they can be built. The restrictions range from town zone, game year, city population, number of same buildings already built, either in the city or on the entire map. Some buildings face tougher restrictions, the more of them have already been built on the map.

. Building protection; there is extensive support for building protection. Unique buildings are protected from demolition by the AI and town, players can still demolish them but at a high price and bad ratings with the local authority. Other buildings have a nil chance to disappear when 'young', but that chance increases with age (5 levels; i.e. nil, 1 in 4, 1 in 2, 3 in 4 and finally in any case they can be removed by the AI or town).

. Cargo Acceptance; all buildings accept (a choice of up to 3 per tile) passengers and mail as well as goods and food in all climates (as long as the relevant industry is available in game). The same goes for tourists, the tourist industry must be available in game for the hotels to support tourists. Once that is the case, tourists can travel from town to town, city to city, as long as there are hotels to stay at.

. Snow; it is fully snow aware naturally, in both temperate and arctic games. Variable snow line feature is included in NA City (it has the same functionality as in NA Roads and Canadian Stations sets).

. Climates; available in all climates, including sub-tropical for those that insist on it.

This set is far from finished, there are plans to add many more buildings, including services such as banks, petrol stations, places of worship, waterside mansions .... If an industry/cargo set developer has a product that could be of interest to our residents and/or businesses; we would be more than happy to provide outlets for them.

For the time being, you may enjoy this taster set ... downloads in the next post ...

Any problems and/or suggestions are most welcome here ... if you believe certain buildings appear too often or not often enough; too early or too late, then any such parameters can be modified with ease [by me]. The user guide contains a list of all available buildings including stats.

Last edited by OzTrans on Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:51 am, edited 2 times in total.

Is this set compatible with other building sets like the original game graphics and Zimmlock's building additions or does this set have to stand alone and block all other additions? I am asking since I do not have access to a .pdf reader with this computer and thus can not read the User Guide.

Is this set compatible with other building sets like the original game graphics and Zimmlock's building additions

This set is fully compatible with TTD 'original' buildings as well as any other buildings sets, like TTRS3. It is also possible to use it with advanced saved games.

It is recommended to use the following procedure to upgrade saved games [TTDPatch only] :

1) load NACity[w/d].grf in your newgrf directory and add the entry to your newgrf.cfg.2) [optional] remove any building sets from newgrf.cfg you no longer want to use [or deactivate such sets later on]3) start your saved game and pause the game.4) deactivate NACity[w/d].grf, if it is active by any chance; [optional] deactivate any unwanted building sets.5) now buildings of removed or deactivated sets will display TTD 'original' graphics.6) run sign cheat : "Cht: PurgeHouses"; this will revert any buildings from 3rd party building sets (that are no longer present in game) to their TTD 'original' equivalent [it will not remove the building].7) activate NACity[w/d].grf in GRF status window.

It will now take about 2 to 3 game years for your cities to develop fully into NA City towns and cities.

If you used TTRS3 (the most common alternative) and you already have a large number of TTRS3 buildings and want to retain these, then this may take much longer. If you prefer a balanced mix of NA City and TTRS3 buildings, then under step 4) deactivate TTRS3 and activate it again under step 7) above. Thus rebuilding all your buildings in a more balanced way.

I awoke this morning to peer under the tree,When to my excited delight what did I see?I saw footprints of coal dust all across the floor."Wait!" I thought to myself "This cannot be!""We heat the house with elec-tricitee!"Jolly old Santa had tracked mud in through the door!

And now for the rest of the story ...

All around the tree there were little buildings, rows upon rows of them, millions of them, scattered everywhere. They covered the carpet! They covered the cat. They covered the sofa. They covered the dog. They had reached a critical mass and now they were growing exponentially, covering the presents, the walls, the ceiling. Slowly I backed out of the room to return to my bed to hide under the covers. Then I could feel them, those accursed little houses had followed me in ... they were upon me, poking and pushing ... millions and billions of them .... they were out to cover me too, when all of a sudden ...

My little brother ripped off my bed covers and yelled in my face ...

MERRYCHRISTMAS

Santa brought us that brand new NACities Set we always wanted.

Sorry for the red orudge orudgeo, but 'tis a colour of Christmas you know.Here ... why don't you stand under the mistletoe and I'll bring in ...Melissa Joan Hart!

After toying around with this new set, here are some of my observations.

- Perhaps I am misreading how to perform the snow aspects. The text file included with the set seems vague with the proper set-up. The player can set the snow level then can set the option of when it might snow? Thus in a temperate setting, if I wanted the snow level at level 1 and an arctic winter, would I set the parameters as 1 (space) 132? I attempted this and the tourist aspect was added. Then when I tried 1132, there was still no snow (global warming perhaps?)... Again, perhaps I am drinking one too many drinks at the moment.....

- I really got a kick when I noticed the houses at the edge of town started to appear like the closing credits to that early 1970's television show, "All In the Family". That is, similar in design and all lined up in neat little cookie cutter layers.

- At first, I thought I might have found a graphical error. But then I realized I was looking at the backside of a house and the front was facing the street! Wow - that is impressive!

- Just adding the graphic set to a present game and letting the game run wild at high speeds, I noticed that in time, the set ~overtakes~ every other building graphic set. Within five years, the cities definitely looked American while fragments of Zimmlock's buildings were nearly extinct. And like any American layout, my trains were lost and the vehicles were broken and old.

- Pet quirk of mine: will future additions have the option of food as an accepted cargo? Short of my warehouse (which is poor next to this set), the food - though not a part of a true temperate set, seems to be a lacking aspect.

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